Catalog the contents of your optical media: Visual CD 3.0

Visual CD 3.0
http://www.boozet.org/visualcd.htm
Supported on: Windows only

Are you archiving pictures, files and other files and media to optical media? If so, you know that it is quite frustrating to find that file you are looking for if you ever need it in the future once you've moved it from your computer. Sure, you can label your discs with as much information as you can, but what if you could remember only the name of a file instead of what disc it was on?

Visual CD is an application that allows you to index the contents of your discs and allow you to search the contents at a later date.

Visual CD can do all of this and more - it can index the files from the disc by name, date, ID3 tag data and even catalog files which are contained in ZIP/RAR/CAB archive files. Additionally, you can password protect catalogs in case you want to hide sensitive filenames from prying eyes.

Among other things, you can set comments for a subset of files or folders and create a catalog description so you have some help later on when you search for those files again. I have to say, the number of options available for this little program are astounding. Your catalog save/open paths are customizable, and you can also tell Visual CD to index some additional file details like picture thumbnails and EXIF data, video info, hidden files and folders and MP3 information (and more!). Obviously, the more you tell VCD to index, the longer the index takes and the larger your catalog becomes.

Note that this is not a content indexing system, if you could the index all the content of all your discs, the catalogs would be HUGE! So it would work best to name your files with some sort of uniquely identifying info to aid your file search later. That being said, you can browse your archived indexes as though you were sifting through the discs themselves.


A catalog file is created for each disc you index, and are by default stored in the 'My Documents' (customizable) folder with a .vcc extension. If you update a disc, i.e. a read/write CD/DVD, you can update a catalog easily enough for that disc. Finally, VCD keeps track of your catalogs in an easy to view interface, allowing you to double-click and browse them without having the actual media.


We actually used something like this at my previous job - - it was called 'Whereisit' (not freeware), used to back up files for our users.

When we needed to archive some outdated data from our servers, we would burn them to DVD, catalog the files in Whereisit, then place the disc in our vault. If the user needed some files from a previous archive, we would simply perform a search in Whereisit, and it would tell us which CD the files were contained. We could then go to our vault and pull the DVD to restore the file.

Of course, this system requires that you label your CD with some sort of identifying mark...then, you would name the catalog in the software with the same name.

I could see this program being especially useful for multimedia enthusiasts who produce video or audio on the computer and have discs upon discs of samples, stock photography or video that they must keep track of.

Problem:

I did encounter one problem when I attempted to search through three catalogs at once, one being password-protected. When it came time to type in the password when it wanted to search the archive (which was good), I hit 'cancel'. Then Visual CD stated it encountered an error, and would I like to see the log file. At this point it should just state something like "One or more archives were not able to be accessed due to an invalid password, etc."...and then let me go on. All in all, that is easy enough to work around, but you should be aware if you are indexing multiple password-protected catalogs.

Support?

No forums as of yet, but you can contact them through the Web page and donations are welcome. There are a couple other useful utilities available here as well:

• BeClean - Registry & Startup Cleaner
• Double Driver - Backup & Restore Drivers
• HTML Extractor - HTML Code maintenance & search and replace